Ralph Fiennes' characters are disturbed, even if he's unruffled

January 03, 2009|By Roger Moore, TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS: Orlando Sentinel

Ralph Fiennes began the year as the terrifying mob boss Harry in the acclaimed Martin McDonagh tragi-comic thriller "In Bruges," delivering a performance of "stony malignance," enthused Tae Mawson of the BBC.

He followed that with a Golden Globe-nominated turn as a cruel cuckold in the 18th Century costume epic "The Duchess."

And he's finishing the year with a lead in "The Reader," a film heralded by awards buzz and controversy over its subject -- German guilt and atonement for the Holocaust.

"Every part," Fiennes says, involves fitting himself "into someone else's head and body, and that's hard. Once you dig into any character, it always costs you something, as a person. You carry around their shadows, their scars, and try and really work your imagination so that you feel those things."

Fiennes has wrestled with a wide range of dark and disturbed characters over the course of his career -- winning a Tony for his "Hamlet" on Broadway, scaring a generation to death as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.

"Playing Voldemort gave me the courage to shave my head, if nothing else," Fiennes jokes from London, where he is starring in "Oedipus" for the National Theatre.

But the actor whose big break came in his Oscar-nominated depiction of a Nazi concentration camp commandant in "Schindler's List" says few roles have left him as puzzled as Michael, the title character in "The Reader."

In the film of Bernhard Schlink's novel, Michael is a German haunted by his first love, a mysterious older woman who introduced him to sex as a teenager in the 1950s. Part of her mystery is what she did during World War II.

"He's in a conundrum, morally. He knows things that are in conflict with his emotions about her. All these questions about what he should think and feel about her aren't really resolved until the last frame of the movie."

Symbolically, Michael is often seen as representing the first post-war generation in Germany, struggling with conflicted feelings about what their parents and elders did during Hitler's rule.

"It's a tricky thing, when people try to interpret Michael as 'the whole of Germany' or an entire generation," Fiennes says. "I find that difficult to get my head around. I see him as one man, wrestling with the circumstances of Germany and the memory of this intimate relationship."

"The Reader's" controversy stems from both its Holocaust-through-non-Jewish-German-eyes point of view and its treatment of sexuality. Michael was 15 when Hanna, played by Kate Winslet in the film, took him as a lover. That has led some to see Michael's confused, emotionally cut-off adulthood as indicative of the abuse from an inappropriate sexual relationship.

"I don't understand that," says Fiennes, 46. "I had an affair of the body and the heart with an older woman at a very young age and never felt abused for one second. Michael was curious. He initiated. It never occurred to me that she was abusing him, somehow."

The actor is on safer ground regarding the film's exploration of what writer Hannah Arendt famously described as "the banality of evil," the search for explanations for why ordinary Germans did what they did. Fiennes has no time for those who would limit the ways films approach the Holocaust.

"To understand how something as horrific as the Holocaust could have come about, the psychology of the perpetrators, should we not try to see where it came from? We can organize society, education, our culture, our way of communicating, around that understanding, all with an idea of preventing its ever happening again. Where's the wrong in that?"